[ToC]

 

Alexander Rose

3 PIECES

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These three pieces represent the "Ancient Greece" section of a larger series which attempts to describe some of the major ideas of Western intellectual history in pictorial terms. Pythagoras, for example, believed that everything in the universe was connected—the cosmos, the overtone series in music, the sacred proportions of Euclidean geometry. In the first design, I "plug" these ancient terms to a kind of wiring schematic, as if the world was a machine. In his treatise, "Poetics," Artistotle describes a paradigm for tragic form in theater. Here, I equate this dramatic structure to sleep cycles—the rise and fall of the brain's ultradian rhythms mirrors the various stages of dramatic tension and release .The Plato piece takes what is probably the most famous philosophical metaphor of all time, the Allegory of the Cave, and sets it to an anatomical sketch of an eye. [To have "dilated pupils" means facing the "wall of shadow" within the cave, whereas "undilated pupils" means having liberated oneself and faced the daylight from the mouth of the cave.]